Tristan Tzara

Geoffrey Hamilton
October 21, 1996

The life story of Tristan Tzara is also an outline of a problem for this century regarding knowledge: the fearful reluctance of influential thinkers to stare down the meaninglessness of existence without needing to redeem it.

From Einstein to Jung, from Chomsky to Tzara, all have wanted to make the world a better place. It wasn't that Tzara in particular lacked an overall courageous attitude, after all he risked his life, his honour, and his self respect continuously in the pursuit of his ambitions, but when in his teens he discovered the relativity of all meaning he was afraid of the implications for all humanity and himself. He needed to redeem that meaninglessness by proving that relative meaning could be made an absolute.

It was much later in his life when he realized what he had been doing all this time with the dada movement. In 1947, at 51 he said dada was born out of a moral requirement to search for absolute truth untainted by preconceived ideas. He blamed history for the relativity of meaning as well as for the use of conventions and institutions.

This blaming of social constructions is why, he, in a sense, represents so many great thinkers, and why he and so many turned to communism, fascism, or other political affiliations. Tzara, like the others, was afraid of the obvious answer: that meaning cannot be anything but relative. It was this fear which prevented him from recognizing the exactitude of his own words.

The following quotations can be considered the founding ideas for Tzara's dada thinking. There are three important points to be looked for: his recognition of the futility of existence, his recognition of the relativity of purpose and meaning, and his recognition that some kind of motivation exists despite the first two facts:
1 - "The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike."
2 - "You explain to me why you exist. You will say: I exist to make my children happy....You will never be able to tell me why you exist, but you will always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never understand that life is a pun."
3 - "There is no logic. Only relative necessities discovered a posteriori, valid not in any exact sense but only as explanations."
4 - "For everything is relative..../Words...have a different meaning for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement among all...Words which have not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed to finding in them."
This last point is the point which is the heart of Tzara's fear. It is Tzara who is accustomed to finding absolutes in words and these statements are his moments of disillusionment.

The next quotations begins to show how he overcomes his disillusionment.
5 - "Their meaning changes from one individual one epoch, one country to the next...It is diversity that makes life interesting."
Why his idea, that diversity is interesting, should matter, he does not argue, but it hints at what he is afraid of. I'll come back to it in a moment.

These next quotations are what I would call realistic and accurate accountings of why existence is irrelevant to everyone but ourselves.
6 - "Measured by the scale of eternity, all activity is in vain"
Yet, however, he states exactly why he continues to be active.
7 - "If I continue to do something it is because it amuses me...."
Here, with amusement - like the idea of interest, there is a symptom of something he continually hovers over but refuses to acknowledge.

Tzara is motivated to activity despite the meaninglessness of all activity. Why is such a flippant remark as "it amuses me" to be considered important? Why is the interest that something holds for people to be considered enough of a substance to justify relative meaning? Well ask the question - why? - and do it enough, and amusement will be the essence of any answer. Why did you climb the mountain? Why did you kill your mother. Why did you eat this morning. Why did you create a poem? The thing supposedly aimed at and valued is never completely satisfactory. It always will come down to a sentiment similar, if not identical to, being amused.

Tzara himself was amused buy his own antics. It kept him free and that freedom was an absolute for him - but the type of amusement being pursued must always change. You've got that car you've always wanted, but when that new model comes out you'll want to that new one even more. All activities are like that from sex, love and work, to murder, research, and fashion. When you think of it - What must heaven be, but a place, above all others, where you had better not be bored. Heaven is a place where something, anything better happen, or eternity would be pure hell.

For the sake of argument, then, amusement is a motive or rather a symptom of what motivates activity in Tzara's meaningless existence.
But what is it that produces amusement then? Why is it so many activities produce amusement. Everything is amusement from the primal hunt for food, to playing sports, to murder, to reading about murder in an Agatha Christie book. And ask not only the positive 'why' questions but also why is failure to be amused so disastrous a feeling.

Think of the failures one can have: bad sex, a C plus average, the loss by Canada against the US this year in hockey. Just as a game of no importance gives you that horrible loser feeling, so all motivated activities are literally games where we get to feel like losers when we fail.

Ask next why we find our goals arbitrary and always have the need for challenge in reaching these goals? Why do these games alleviate boredom and offers amusement. Even a charioteer narrowly escaping death in the Circus Maximus is being amused.

Let me just add, before getting back to Tzara, that the reason why games motivate us is genetic. We all have a game gene, for lack of a better description, that is inside us, specifically, to motivate us to exist. Part of that trick involves giving us our rewards through our pleasure receptors in the brain. Think of sex as a model for all games.
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Tzara talked of the 'games of life' and of the meanings made in life, but it was pejorative. He continually had to judge things, to moralize. (think of dada's anti-war slant). His overriding ethic, his interfering evaluation of the facts, distorted the idea of games as a possible reason why meaning must be relative.

While judging ethics arbitrarily he couldn't bring himself to that state of wild abandon needed to see that games were what he was seeing around him. Instead he was going to impose his ethics on what he does see. "...give equal importance to each object, being, material (or) organism of the universe." This sentiment was the conclusion to one game in his life: what is the truth? And it was a lie.

Tzara's other moral game modifies this absolute egalitarianism by saying that knowing the first conclusion will help accentuate man and better him. A blatant attempt to unpset his own egalitarianism. Why he should want to do anything when all activity is in vain, is once again due to the human desire for amusement - the game gene. He had these two games going all the time in his career, the search for truth and the bettering of humanity. He combined the two in his art.

Art was no mere amusement to tzara. Here he says, while still in his twenties, "But even if life were a bad joke...we have proclaimed art as the sole basis of understanding." This is his combined game of morals and truth. He wants to understand life and the problem was that if he faces the truth, that only games are what give meaning to life, his moral game would be over.

This amusement may be a strange place to enter into his biographical details but his life makes more sense in the light of the above argument.

Tristan Tzara was born in Romania in April 1896, and, interestingly, I don't remember a centenary this year marking his birth. He lived and learned to be a poet in his home country until the autumn 1915 when his parents sent him to school in Zurich. Within a few months of his arrival the cabaret Voltaire started and the dada movement was born. He was only nineteen.

As a writer, the way Tzara believed he could find the absolute in the relative was by putting aside the meanings and conventions brought about by history, and by using the automatic writing idea. At this time he wrote of the idea of "the mouth thinks". That somehow by being unconventional and illogical he was bypassing the relative meaning of language and finding a primitive, therefore, genuine, form of communication.

He was fascinated by the so-called primitive art and languages and in a sense had Rousseau's noble savage idea. He acknowledges his debt to many others, but "what the hell", he might have said, I'll take credit for as much as I can get away with.

Many claimed they began dada and all I would like to say on this subject was that dada was possibly the sixty seventh step on an infinitely long walk and Tzara was acknowledged to be the leader of it by a great many of Dada's practitioners. It is my belief that the most relevant aspect of dada's influence was it's ability to make people think they can be free of the influences around them, including precursors. Tzara, no doubt, was instrumental is bringing that about.

Even Andre Breton could acknowledge that idea of freedom and as leader of the movement in Paris he invited Tzara to visit him in 1920. However, as early as July 1923 Breton and his cohorts had turned on Tzara and they attacked a production of his play The Gas Heart.

For a while afterwards he avoided Breton and the surrealists in Paris, got married to a Swedish poet, and had a son in 1927. But by 1929 he finally joined the surrealists and even received a written apology from Breton for his earlier attack.

Tzara's Communist ideas began within this period. He believed that the passage from primitive societies to capitalistic society has been accompanied by the impoverishing passage from dream to directed thought.

This idea is a development of his automatic writing theories and was directed towards creating a new communism. More importantly at this stage it gives to surrealism an ethical basis for being. Basally it meant the absolutes of life can now be found hanging around in dreams that, like automatic writing, will circumvent history, and create a communist society, a communist society which is the goal of these secreted absolutes within people.

His ideas at this time indicate where his ethical game could take him. He wanted un-directed thinking and says, "...We have to organize dreams, idleness, leisure, with a view to communist society; this currently is the task of poetry." Surreal poetry, he thinks, can rearrange society by the force of the subconscious; "Language itself is a phenomenon of social order".

In 1935 he declared himself a communist, but not a party member. I think this claim demonstrated his belief that the goodness of mankind can arrive naturally when unfettered. But he came to a slow realization that external pressure is necessary to bring that particular nature to the surface.

He attacked surrealism in print in 1935 and formed a short lived 'surrationalist' group around his ideas. It was in a magazine called Inquisitions.

Tzara and his followers grasped onto what is called today Chaos Theory and called it indeterminacy. his method to overcome it was surrational, or though the power of the rational subconscious.

He begins to believe that play is what unlocks his ethical world. He makes various points regarding many artists who are playful to emphasize that idea. But still he doesn't see the playfulness as the common cord.

Play in art he took to be experimental, in the same way that science is experimental. Even more ironic is his growing belief that the emphasis in art should be on the creative act not on the object of art. Once again he hovers over the game as the source of meaning but fails to accept it.

In the Second World War he stayed in France writing and organizing for the resistance. In 1947, despite the evidence of Stalin's restrictions on non-directed thinking, he finally joins the communist party.

Once again Breton attacks Tzara during a performance. This time in a speech where Tzara admits he was looking for absolutes all along during his career. He calls it the unfulfilled expectation of the absolutely good person, his approximate man, who will some day become fully realized.

During the last days of his life a new movement called letrism sprang up and considered him its grandfather. It was a new dadaism of sorts. The spiritual granddaughter of Tzara would be Isadore Isou, she carried on his search for the hidden absolutes. She said, "Throughout the existence of language there has been a suspicion that behind language there was an anti-linguistic unknown, a chasm and garbage can of our means of transmission".

Compared to Tzara's early writing the parallel proves several things, he says in 1918, "Already the edifice of our language is too undermined for anyone to recommend that thought take refuge in it.".

The harping on that same theme will be endless and as such, the game of truth as an absolute amused Tzara throughout his life and will most likely continue to bemuse influential thinkers for eons to come.

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